Transport committee  As I mentioned earlier, the amendments do not directly impact Western Canada Marine Response, but we do feel they clarify and improve the ability of the Coast Guard to respond with authority and leadership to incidents on the coast. We feel that's a net positive.

Transport committee  The regime that is in place now was the result of the Exxon Valdez oil spill back in 1989. It created a very strong and very robust regime, which has done an excellent job in preventing the kind of catastrophic spills that the Exxon presented, or potentially presented, to the coa

Transport committee  No, what I would say is that we can always improve the regime, and what we support is the general movement towards a more risk-based model. When you're looking at risk, you're not only looking at probability. You're also looking at the consequence. Obviously, on the west coast, t

Transport committee  That is correct. In fact I'm in Sydney right now for one of our annual exercises. It's a 10,000-tonne simulated spill and the Coast Guard is always involved in our exercises. As I mentioned they're part of the unified command, but their staff are also involved in different sectio

Transport committee  Broadly, when we're looking at indigenous involvement and knowledge in spill response in particular, there are two sides we can look at. The first is the planning side. WCMRC and other agencies have really worked hard to involve indigenous knowledge in planning for spills. I men

Transport committee  I will provide some illustration of our role within the response regime. I should say that there are many partners in the response regime, both from the federal family and provincial, municipal, and first nation partners. There are a lot of players involved in response. Broadly

Transport committee  None of the amendments directly impact response organizations. There are changes to the Canada Shipping Act that we've been looking forward to, but they are not found in this bill. Typically we've been looking forward to changes to planning standards, and we've been told that tho

Transport committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the committee. I would like to provide the committee with an overview of how Western Canada Marine Response operates within the current regime, and then provide our input on the proposed amendments. Western Canada Marine Response, or WCM